This invention relates generally to electronic messaging systems. More particularly, this invention relates to a multimedia messaging system in which message information processed and stored by any of a plurality of interconnected electronic mail systems can be accessed from any system.
Voice mail messaging in a telecommunication system when the caller is unavailable has become nearly ubiquitous. The voice message is recorded and a notification may be given to the called party indicating the presence of a message. Further, it is also common to provide electronic mail systems such as IBM's PROFS.TM. and OfficeVision/VM.TM. in which text messages are sent from a sender's computer terminal over a data network to other computer terminals within the network. While these messaging systems have greatly improved the efficiency of today's office environment, access to a terminal or voice mail system is not always possible. Further, as the office environment evolves toward multimedia systems, one will work with a large amount of information, collected from a variety of media types including text, image, video, voice and facsimile. Much of this information need not originate from the local computer terminal. Thus, it would be advantageous if the receiver could receive mail from all of these different media, or at least notification thereof, whether he had access to all or to only one of the mail systems normally at his disposal. In other words, it would be advantageous to integrate the messaging systems efficiently, particularly voice mail and electronic mail systems because of their relative prevalence, such that all types of mail items are available from any system.
The prior art has suggested several possible integrated messaging systems, all of which have their disadvantages. One system includes a human operator who takes the phone message, when the receiving party is unavailable and manually types in a notification which is sent to the receiving party's electronic mail. In this system, the receiving party has notification of the message, but because of the manual nature of the transaction, only a limited amount of information is generally forwarded. The user does not generally have access to an entire voice message at his data terminal as he would with a voice mail system.
At least one other proposed integrated messaging system would allow a recipient to access both text and voice messages from either the electronic mail system or the voice mail system. However, the recipient must designate which messaging system is to receive all of the messages. This is a burden on the recipient who must be able to project to which system he is more likely have access and whose plans may be subject to change. If the recipient guesses incorrectly, both types of mail may be unavailable. The capabilities of the terminals of the respective systems differ greatly in capability, a computer terminal is more versatile in handling some of the media types than a telephone. Choosing the more readily available system, voice mail, because of uncertain travel plans can lead to the loss of considerable message content. Further, prior systems send the entire content of a message to the designated recipient service which reduces system performance given the large amount of data in a multimedia message.
Only a limited degree of integration of the various messaging services is taught by the prior art. Usually, the recipient is only notified that he has messages on one or more of his message services. If the messaging systems are not well integrated with a consistent message protocol, there is always the possibility that a foreign message will be rejected.